This Week in Startups - $RBLX earnings, Jetson ONE personal aircraft + Oculus game dev Ryan Engle, creator of Pro Putt | E1322

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

First Jason covers Roblox earnings, the platform's total usage is up 28% year over year (2:19)! In a new segment, "We Live in the Future," Jason shares Jetson One, a personal E-VTOL (11:16). Then, Ryan Engle of Golf+ joins to talk about the VR golf game his team developed for Oculus (23:08), Meta's lead in VR hardware (51:29) and more.

Okay, everybody, we got some cool news for you. Roblox's earnings are out, and we're going to do a new segment today. We live in the future. And we're going to let you know about a cool new startup that is doing basically speeder bikes or spinners from Blade Runner. Very cool new technology in the Vitol space. Got some exciting video there, too, if you watch the YouTube channel. After that, Ryan Engel is with us. He is the CEO and founder of Golf Plus.

you might remember a few weeks ago I tweeted about Oculus and the try, oh my, goodbye. People just absolutely trying it, absolutely loving it and then never using it again because it's too bulky and maybe it's just too intense for casual gamers, but hardcore gamers still prefer

PCs. Well, in that thread, Ryan had a really considered response, so we decided to have them on the shelf, and Golf Plus makes an amazing VR game for Oculus called ProPut by Top Golf. So go check that out. And we talk about, all the issues in AR versus VR. How much time people are actually going to want to spend in VR

with these heavy, clunky headsets, when we're going to get the AR headsets that are just like putting on a pair of sunglasses and what companies are developing the best headsets, maybe when Apple's headset will come out. It's a really deep dive into the VR versus AR debate and the entire Metaverse space. And he is really credible because he's working in it every day. Really appreciated having him on the episode. So let's get to it. in Startups is brought to you by. Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-WD.com slash twist. Silicon Valley Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has been

providing banking and financial solutions for every stage of the startup journey. Learn more at com slash twist and disruptive advertising sign up for a free digital marketing audit at disruptive advertising.com slash twist plus if you go into business with disruptive you'll receive a $250 gift card and a free Friday to Sunday ski trip in Utah. Okay, Roblox reported a huge quarter into three doubling revenue year over year to $509 million dollars full disclosure. My wife bought, I don't know how much, but she bought a bunch of role blogs because she believed in it. And I think she got in at the IPO, which was like 45 or 50 bucks. So I guess I have a bias here towards this stock.

Not really, but I'm happy for her that she made that bet. She's got, you know, she made the Bitcoin bet too at $100. So I give my wife a lot of credit. Their shares jumped 30% in after hours trading. it's now at $100 a share. That's a $13 billion increase in their market cap. Crazy days right now, folks, $57 billion market cap. Big takeaways, Roblox users are insanely engaged.

Some back of the envelope math here, because it's kind of hard to understand, but based on our analysis, the number of hours people are engaged in this platform is bonkers. they had 11.2 billion hours up 28% year over year. Now, 11.2 billion hours in a 90-day quarter, right? And you divide that by 47 million daily active users. You get an average of 236 hours per user in Q3.

Again, 90 days. If people use the service for 60 days, that would be four hours a day. if they did it every single day, it would be 2.6 hours a day. That's a lot of time on a platform. I am stunned by that, but in some ways not. I mean, if you look at people

who are addicted to Twitter, they're on there for more than an hour or two a day. So I'm not sure if, you know, this back of the envelope math works out, but, you know, in terms of, there's developers on the platform and people building stuff. If you don't know,

Roblox is a video game platform where developers can create games inside of the app. They went public via a direct listing on March 10th. They saw an in-game currency called Robux, which allows people to buy games and outfits, you know, all that kind of stuff that people are talking about now with NFTs being so special that you could actually take your character's abilities

or outfits and move them from one game to another. That isn't happening yet, but that is the promise of this new metaverse. if you think about the Metaverse, not as a VR or AR headset, just as a 3D world that would be represented on a 2D monitor. They also have something called Roblox Premium, which is a monthly subscription, and creators and developers on Roblox can earn money,

and they earned 130 million in Q3, which is a 52% year of a year. Roblox takes 30%, just like Apple. And so this is pretty staggering in terms of the earnings, for these games and these platforms, revenue of $509 million, that's a lot of money when you think about it. And these have to be incredibly,

incredibly high margin businesses. Total bookings, which includes some deferred revenue with $637 million, what that means when you hear deferred revenue, somebody might buy the year in advance, so they might have more cash coming in a quarter, and then they will do something called accrual-based accounting,

where you spread those payments out and you get to get credit for the, them each month or quarter, depending on how you've set it up. They lost $74 million. That's up 55% year over a year. I'm not sure what the total cost is here for this business. They have 1,400 employees, and that's up 66% year over year. Revenue per employee for Q through was about 355K.

So I guess they have a lot of employees to run this business. You've got to think they could run this business with half as many employees and it would be printing money. they're obviously in investment mode. 80% of their employees are either engineering or product focused according to Roblox. If you look at their Dow's, 47 million, that's up 31% year over year, just a hair above 47 million. Their average booking per daily active users is $13.49. That's down your over year.

In other words, if you have 500 million in revenue in the quarter and you have almost 50 million folks, just over $10 per user per quarter, which means per year, we're talking about, you know, close to 50 bucks a year. Pretty amazing when you think about it. That is some serious revenue. And that's year after year. These folks are going to stick around. So I am much more bullish on Roblox.

When we compared it, I thought it was more of a hit-based business. But this developer ecosystem is obviously starting to thrive. And when you see revenue double like that, clearly I understand. underestimated the impact of those network effects. I know Fortnite has over 100 million people using it every month. So there does seem to be this ability to hit 100 million people using a platform a quarter. So this could definitely double. All right.

And looking at the Wikipedia, there is a page. You can look at up yourself, a list of most played video games by player count. Player Unknown's Battleground and Crossfire, two free-to-play games, both owned by 10s that have over a billion users. Dungeon Fighter, 700 million users as of May 2020. I'm just looking down this list. Minecraft, 600 million users as of November 2020. That's pretty amazing.

Pac-Man Doodle. I've never heard of this. A Pac-Man Doodle from Google, I guess. 500 million peak daily players in May of 2020. Candy Crush Saga, hit 500 million players. So clearly, you know, you can get to hundreds of millions. So if we look at Roblo, here. They had 202 million peak

monthly players according to Wikipedia on April 2021. The number we gave you before 47 million is their daily active users. Obviously, you get a much bigger number by the people who don't play every day. I wonder if that means they could double that, triple it? I mean, it's possible

I guess the upper limit here seems to be a billion. So if we gave them credit for hitting in between those two numbers, 200 and a billion, that would be plus 400 million. You're they get to 600 million monthly, which means they could triple their revenue. So it does seem like they're on the trajectory to do something similar to that and get to Minecraft's number, which is 600 million. That to me would seem to be a pretty amazing run. And that

means the stock would be triple, or the revenue would triple. And that seems plausible to me. I don't know where the natural audience limit is or if they would have to, you know, get more people into video games for this to go beyond that. There seems to be a natural audience for these. Another thing to consider in all of this is there could be other business model innovations that occur that generate more revenue. Obviously, they're selling in-game items. They also have a premium subscription. And if they embraced NFTs or a marketplace where people could trade their goods, that could give them a little bit of lift. And I wonder if Roblox users, when they grow up, if there's going to be other games that they would want to play.

I know a lot of Roblox players came from the Minecraft ecosystem, and then once you move from one to the other, I'm not sure if you go back. So it'd be an interesting question if somebody could find the data on that. But congratulations to Roblox team. It's time for another R Crowd Deal of the week. Right now, you can join our crowd's investment in Intellact. According to the deal memo,

Intelax's transportation innovation could save the airline industry $3 billion a year. Interlax uses machine learning to improve safety, recognize hazards, and reduce delays. And they're already being used at some major international airports. And these airports serve over 100 million passengers annually, according to the deal memo. We know that all over the world of tech, companies are innovating and driving returns for investors, while our crowd's team analyzes many of these companies across the entire global private market. Then they select companies with the greatest growth potential and bring them to you. from personalized medicine to cybersecurity to robotics, one of my favorites, to quantum computing, and

more. In state-of-the-art labs, startup barrages, and anywhere in between, Our Crowd identifies innovators so that you can invest when growth potential is greatest, which is early. If you're an accredited investor, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR, CROWD.com slash twist, and review the current deals. There is no payment involved until you decide to invest. That's our crowd.com slash twist to sign up for free. Okay, we're bringing back an old segment called We Live in the Future, W-L-I-T-F, not W-T-F, W-L-I-T-F, we live in the future. And so every week or two, we're going to talk about things that will hopefully

blow your mind or things we've been talking about in science fiction that are becoming reality. And the one that's had me absolutely captivated for some time now is V-TOL aircraft, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And we just have an incredible video here to watch. This is from a company called Jetson 1, and they make an electronic veto. And here we have the Jetson 1 flying around.

They released this video recently. And the pilot is the co-founder and CTO, Tomosh Paton. He stated the mission on their website. We intend to make everyone a pilot. And here are some specs for their veto. It's 190 pounds. That is light. And it can support a pilot weight of up to 210 pounds.

So I am safely under that since I lost 20 pounds this year. It includes eight motors. And the company claims it can fly safely with the loss of one motor. And so that is one of the amazing things about V-toles. When you think about a drone, if you're not watching this incredible science fiction, that looks like something out of Blade Runner and the spinners in Blade Runner, or maybe a Star Wars film with speeder bikes. What's amazing about VTOLs when compared to a helicopter,

if you think about just the drones that your family might have flown on some holiday when somebody buys one, uses it, and then puts it away and never uses it again. Those things have maybe eight rotors. And if one of them goes down, the software knows that that one's down. It stops spinning. And it just recalibrates the other ones to automatically, save the drone and help it land properly, etc. So that's going to be one of the great things about VTOLs.

They are going to be much safer, I believe, than helicopters. Helicopters have, yeah, a lot of downside. They're very complicated to fly. They obviously don't have eight motors, rotors. I think most of them have redundant and have two. The max speed of this V-toll is 63 miles an hour. Current flight time 20 minutes. So that's a very short flight time.

These are going to be toys for a while. Think of them like wave runners or, you know, those kind of devices in terms of utilization. They're not going to be for commutes right now. This thing's 10 by 7 in terms of feet. And it uses high discharged lithium ion batteries. Includes a three-axis joystick and LIDAR sensors that will monitor the terrain and obstacles.

Total price 92K. You can put down deposit for 22K. I'm tempted to do that, although I wouldn't want to be part of the first group of people to own these. It'll arrive 50% assembled, and it's up to the owner to assemble the other 50%. I wonder if that's because this is going to be some sort of a kit or that's their business model. There'll be other versions of this. Obviously, we saw Jobi go public. Regulations are going to have to be worked out for this to operate in the United States on something other than private land.

Clearly, they're on a private course here. are you going to need a pilot's license? Probably not. These things are probably automated when they get out to the mass consumers. For this one, yeah, they're going to have to come up with some sort of, since you are controlling it, pilots license for it. And I wonder if it'll have to be a certain speed. You know, when you drive an e-bike, I think the max speed of an e-bike is 30 miles per hour or 25. For a motorcycle license, I think you can have up to 34cc.

Don't quote me on that. in like 35, 40 miles an hour, and then above that, you have to get a motorcycle license. So a May 2020 article in Aviation Airport Development Law.com claim the regulation of vetoes by the FAA is severely lagging. And so this will come up. But if an individual builds at least 51% of an aircraft, they can register a plane in the FAA's experimental or amateur built category. And so that sounds to me like what's going on here is that the Jetson 1 might fall into that experimental or amateur built category. That to me is something that has never, ever been of interest.

Like being a test pilot, I mean, that's how John Denver tragically died. I think he was operating like an experimental plane. My lord, that is a high level of danger, is to do experimental planes or ones that you built yourself. Absolutely no interest in that. but I have a lot of interest in these vetoes, because I think they could be safer ultimately than driving in a city or driving on the highway. Driving on the highway, there's a lot of things to crash into, driving in the air. There's not going to be a lot of things to crash into, and these can easily land themselves.

If there's a problem, they can land on water very easily. They're not going to be 10, 20,000 feet in the air. They're going to be a thousand feet. They're going to be flying over water. If there's a problem, it probably would be able to withstand it. And certainly if there's a amount of... function, they do have the ability to land gracefully, as you've probably seen with, you know, various tests of these things, certainly more gracefully than a helicopter or a plane spinning out

of control. Now, the battery technology is going to have to take a lot more time, but we saw that with Tesla's. You know, the Roadster had, I think, 190 mile rating. Realistically, you got over 100, maybe 120. So we'll see these, I think, arrived faster than we thought. In fact, think in some cities we'll see these as a commuting option before we're going to see self-driving without a drive without a steering wheel. So let me say that again. It's completely possible that in a city like San Francisco, the Bay Area, or Sydney or Melbourne or Rhode Island, anywhere that's on a bay, New York City comes to mind as well with a Hudson and the East River, these are going to be great for flying over the water. Why? You're not going to have to worry about

buildings or landing on people. Whereas, you know, if this was flying over a city like Los Angeles, kind of not the ideal place. Like Los Angeles would be the worst place for this. You got these things flying everywhere. They start falling out of the sky. They land on people, God forbid, somebody dies. You have people in the plane dying and people on the ground dying or people in the Vitol dying. So California is going to be the worst place for it. But a bay area with islands, perfect, perfect for these. In fact, you could see these. in New York City doing absolutely phenomenal. Just going to JFK, you just go right along the Hudson,

going out to Coney Island, you know, flying into Manhattan. These things could wind up being everywhere. In fact, I think that one possibility we'll see is some of these tall buildings in Manhattan and other cities will have, you know, a couple of floors where they'll fly into. And so these will be able to very easily navigate, you know, some 30-foot landing platform in a high rise.

And then if you live in the high rise, you could go down to the whatever, up or down to the 80th floor, let's say. Get in one of these. It hovers. It flies out over the city, takes you to the airport. You come home from the airport, boom.

It's going to be a brave new world, folks, and these are the real deal. In 2023, they're going to deliver 21 units they claim, and that's pretty amazing. The 2023 deposit locations included Hawaii, San Francisco, Alabama, Florida, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, and more.

J-O-B-Y went public via SPAC, and they've been trading under that ticker-sumble J-O-B-Y, currently valued almost $6 billion, $5.7 billion. And they expect their commercial operations to start in 2024. Reid Hoffman helped take Joby Public through his SPAC. I think that's what Mark Pinkis, reinvent technology partners. And Reid spoke with me about Joby on Angel episode 6 from season 5, if you want to check that out. Now, there's a Chinese company called E-Hang, E-H-A-N-G, and they're building

autonomous aerial vehicles, basically V-TOLs that fly themselves. The videos are amazing. I've been watching these videos, and I'll throw one up on the screen here if you don't watch on YouTube, YouTube.com session this weekend. They went public in December of 2019. They wanted to do automated flying taxis, but they were accused of fraud by Wolfpack Research in February of 2021. Wolfpack research is an activist shortseller. And they kept, I just love how these activist short sellers name their companies. We have Wolfpack research. You probably remember Hindenburg research.

I believe they did Nicola. And then there was Scorpion Capital recently. So Wolfpack, Scorpion, Hindenburg are online one. You're in trouble. Let me just say that. Hello, sir. We have Wolfpack Research Online One, Scorpion Capital Online 2, and Hindenberg Research is in the lobby.

you're done. They concluded Wolfpack, that is, that E HANG's largest customers fake and also a pre-IPO investor looking to push up their share price. Again, in China, the rules are, let's just say, very fluid. They reference filings and reports

which showed that the sham company was established only nine days before it signed a $65 million contract with E Hang. Again, I have no idea of knowing if this accusation by Wolfpack is true. I'm just relaying it here. after the report was released, E-Hang stock dropped from $124 a share

to $21 a share, and they're at about 25 now a share, which is a $1.4 billion market cap. So I am pretty excited about all of these, and I think that this is the real deal, putting E-Hang aside. The E-Hang developed, some of these E-Hang videos, though,

when I first saw them, I thought they looked fake. Like, I thought they were CGI. And I still look at them and go, is this real or not? And it makes you wonder if they're actually used computer technology to in some way fake these flights. But I don't think so. The videos do look real from Ehang. So that would be something I would want to know.

Like if the business was absolutely corrupt and they were doing the self-dealing and making companies up, I wonder if the technology is real and the company is fake and the business contracts are fake. But the tech is real. It's clearly other people are making this work. and it is going to be awesome. So just a little We Live in the future segment for you. If you have an idea for a we live in the future segment, just email at Producers at This Weekend Startups.com.

It's a long domain name, but it's worth it. You get all three producers on the line. Okay, let's go on to our interview. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if? Are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that can keep founders up at night. And no one understands this quite like Silicon Valley Bank. Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has held thousands of high-growth companies

by providing scalable financial solutions, along with insights and expertise that many other banks just can't. From health care to hardware, software to infrastructure, SBB works with companies across the innovation landscape at all stages of the journey, anticipating their needs even before they do. And by providing access to insights and in-depth reports, SVB can help you make more informed decisions and assist in turning your great idea into a great business, which could be why 50% of US-based, venture-back tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at SVB.com slash twist, Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next. Okay, everybody, you may have seen a tweet I did a couple of weeks ago at Twitter.com slash Jason

where I talked about how people who I know who buy Oculus, especially people who who are into video games like hardcore PC gamers, console gamers, they buy try and then say goodbye to their Oculus. Now, this tweaked a bunch of people, including Palmer Lucky, who started liking, the people who started dunking on me and telling me I'm wrong. And it created kind of a discussion. My point in all of this was my personal experience. The Oculus is so complicated and I don't like not being able to see the real world. I'm not a fan of VR exactly, but I did love BeatSac. I will say that. And I am super impressed with the technology.

But my tweet was intended strictly to look at this phenomenon of people buying them and putting them on the shelf. And it made me wonder out loud, where does VR sit in the gameplay or the options amongst people who play video games? And I thought, casual gamers, people who play like iPad games like bejeweled or some, you know, card game or chats, like it's not for them. and then hardcore gamers who are playing, you know, Fortnite, it's not for them. So who is it for? And the most considered response I got was from a guy named Ryan Engel. And what he does is he makes a golf simulator called Golf Plus. And it was such a compelling response that I thought he should just come on the pod and we should talk about it. So welcome to the program, Ryan Engel. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate the discourse. And I think you're coming from a smart spot.

I mean, VR still has to establish itself. Great. So you've been working on making this VR golf simulator since 2018. You can go see it at ProPut if you would like to visit the website. If you want to follow Ryan on the Twitter, always a good idea when we have a founder to go follow them on Twitter because you can continue the conversation with them yourself. It's R-E-N-G-L-E-8-20.

And I'm assuming 8-20 is an area code somewhere, like you're out of the 8-20. It's even better. birthday. Oh, well, happy birthday in a while on August 20th. All right. So you saw my tweet. You slid in, you got a good reply in there, and you said you're seeing a large number of people who are addicted and your metrics are different than what I was talking about. So what is true about what I said and then what was wrong with what I said, educate me. Okay. So I think, you know, I think your tweet was right in a lot of cases. I think a lot of people buy VR because they are, looking to see what the future is like. And they put it on and, you know, maybe they're not

gamers. Maybe they don't play many games. Maybe they only play certain types of games. And, you know, they try Beat Sabre. They try a few things. And they say, okay, that was interesting, but I'm kind of, you know, this isn't really for me. And what we found is that our numbers show that a strong portion of our players who do play and get past a certain point, stick around and they keep playing. And in our case, we have a golf game. So our demographic is a little bit different than the average VR demographic that Oculus shares. We lean a little bit older, which is pretty interesting. And, you know, we've got quite a few players that are over 60 that play almost daily, including my dad, who I bought the headset for, I asked him to try my game, you know, just because he's my dad. He's never been a gamer. And he doesn't even

play golf anymore, but he used to. And he plays every day because for him, it's just a great way to escape. And especially with COVID, it's like, you know, what else are you going to do? Um, so yeah, I think where you're right is that if you go in saying, blow my mind and like, addict me and this is, you know, I've got my iPhone here and it's just going to captivate me and I'm never going to be able to live without it, you know, you're not, you're not going to get stuck. If you go in with the open mind and you try a bunch of experiences, I think if you try enough experiences, I bet there's one in there that is pretty captivating and it will keep you coming back. So let me ask you a future looking question because obviously this technology is getting

better and better. The Oculus we had four or five years ago. I don't know if it was called the Rift or something. You had to plug it into a computer. You had cables. It sucked. And now you, and it was expensive, you know, thousands of dollars for the PC, $1,500 for the Oculus. Now, the new Oculus, you just don't even need to connect it to your phone anymore, correct? You just turn it on and you're done. No phone. I mean, it's completely standalone. I can bring it with me wherever. It's $300 and it comes with everything that you need, no computer necessary. Right. So that solved a lot of the hardware setup and those problems and costs. So they lose, you think Facebook loses, what, $100 on that, $200 on it?

I, yeah, well, it cost 300. So I think it's probably between 50 and 100. You know, Marcus said they're not making money on the hardware. He actually said they would lose money on it, I think, and the meta thing was that he would continue. And that one is called the Oculus. Quest 2. Quest 2. For now.

And Quest 3 is going to come out. What do you think next year after Christmas or something? What's the word on the street? The guess is that we're looking at an 18-month cycle. They announced at their last conference when they changed their name that they're working on one called Cambria, which is going to be a higher end more expensive. They didn't say the price, but it sounds like it is more targeted at professional users than just gamers. I don't know. It's hard to say, but I would guess around the holidays a year from now,

we'll start to hear more about a Quest 3 or something like that. What do you think in the hardware will be different with the next version? Is it just going to be speed? Is it going to be the lag? Because I still get a little motion sick on these things. And I'm suffer for motion sickness when I'm on boats in the backseat of cars. So I'm a little sensitive to it. I know not everybody is. I will say that the Quest 2 was the least motion sickness I had. And I played Beat Sabre for, I don't know, a solid maybe 20 minutes, you know, going on and off with another person. So I really actually enjoyed Beat Sabre. And I didn't get nauseous. I did get that experience when you take them off where you're like, whoa, real world. But what will be,

is there something that needs to be solved? Or is it just going to be something, incremental in these next versions or the Cambrian is the new high end work. Yeah, I think it's called Cambria. So I think there are a few major factors. We are still so early in this, right? One is, the most important one to me is resolution. Right now, if you put on the quest two and you try to watch a movie that's like even 1080, you're going to see some pixelation. The quality is not as good as if you were watching your TV, right? As soon as the quality is effectively the same as watching like a 4K TV from, you know, seven feet away, 70 inch 4K TV or something, then you get into an interesting scenario where this thing can be a home theater in your

house regardless of how big or small your house is, right? So watching content in VR, I think, is a big opportunity, watching sports and live events where the resolution is so good that you feel like you're watching it, you know, at a movie theater or something like that. The other big one is social. So right now there's some different types of avatar. as we have some in our game. They're varying quality. Some are very creepy. Some are very cartoony.

That's kind of the two sides you get. What they don't have right now is any sort of face tracking. So we're talking on Zoom. I can see your reaction to that comment. You can see me. We can see our hands and everything like that. But eye contact is actually something that you don't get in Zoom that you could get in VR as soon as they can track your pupils.

I think that's a really big deal. And tracking kind of your expressions and stuff. stuff like that. So that allows you to have a much deeper connection with someone where you're not just looking at an avatar that's kind of got this blank stare. People would call nonverbal cues that allow you to know that maybe I want to chime in in this conversation or that you're nodding in agreement to me. And people, I think, underestimate how necessary that is. So those are things that we can expect. Now, when we look at the games, it does seem like we've had enough time to make good games. Like Beat Sabre feels like a game, I would say, from the 2000 to 2010.

console era in terms of how it looks and feels. It doesn't feel that old to me. It's not like it looks like a Nintendo game, right? It looks like 2010 maybe versus like playing Fortnite on your computer. Yeah. I think it was even 2016 maybe or 2017. But yeah, it's not too old. It's not, but I'm just saying in terms of the look and feel.

Right. So, and then gameplay seems to be getting better. So is what's happening that the games that are on, casual iPad games, console games, hardcore games on PC are, it's not competitive with those yet, or it's never going to be competitive with those. That's not what this is for. Those modalities work better. It's better to play a casual game like backgammon or chess or bejeweled on an iPad or iPhone,

and it's better to play Fortnite on a computer with a full keyboard. This is going to be a different type of game, or is it eventually it will compete with those two other categories of gaming? For a while, I think it's going to be pretty different, right? I think the whole point of VR is that it's very immersive. And instead of having a bunch of things kind of going on at the same time and multitasking like you can do with mobile games, in VR, you're like locked into that one experience right now. And that gives you a lot of opportunity.

It forces you to keep the user very entertained while they're using it because they're not going to be distracted by other things. But it's just very different. I think the big difference between console games today and mobile games today is mostly the budget. So even though the power, the power of the quest is somewhat limited, but it's pretty impressive.

But hardly anyone has the budget to really push it because the size of the market just isn't there yet to justify spending $50 million on a game, you know, like you get from the AAA games on console right now. So production value is really there. And then once VR transitions to be how you interact with your, computer, let's say, right? So when I'm working on my computer, I look at my screen right now, but I could be wearing a very lightweight VR headset where comfort is another major factor, right?

Lightweight headset, I see everything. I'm in VR all day while I'm working, and now I probably do have a little widget that is like a solitaire. I can still play solitaire in VR, but it's just a very different way of kind of interacting and engaging with your content. Okay, everybody, let's take a moment to talk about growth marketing and all the tactics and hacks that are out there with me today, Jake Badsgaard. He is the CEO and founder of Disruptive Advertising, which you can visit at disruptiveadvertising.com slash twist. So some questions for you, Jake, what are some of the tips you have for marketers who are planning to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year? Yeah, Jason, 2020 was a phenomenal year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and 2021 is shaping up to be as good if not better. We actually have a benchmark report where we're monitoring $250 million in media budgets.

And we're seeing that CPMs are starting to rise in the 20 to 40 percent range in a lot of industries. And so I'm just worried that a lot of companies are going to get surprised that there's a lot of demand, but the competition is up as well. and if they don't have a good strategy for that, they're going to spend the same amount and get less performance, or they're going to have to spend a lot more to get the same performance. And so they've got to get on top of that. So if you want to sign up for a free digital marketing audit with Jake and his company, disruptive advertising, just visit disruptiveadvertising.com slash twist.

And if you go into business with disruptive, you will receive a $250 gift card and a free Friday to Sunday ski trip in Utah. We'll see you on the slopes. It's going to be a great season. So one thing I noted when the conversation started with you on Twitter was golf is expensive. It's time consuming. It requires travel. It requires coordination.

A lot of those things. So to get the golf experience, you need a tea time. You need a club membership. You need a, like I said, a golf clubs. You need three other people to play with. Here, you can get that same experience. And it is, you know, a really cool experience. The same thing with maybe mountain climbing, rock climbing, skiing.

I was starting scuba diving. I was thinking about things that are expensive pursuits that are hard to coordinate, that are super immersive. You're only doing that one thing you're lost in it. So I just came up with snowboarding scuba, mountain climbing, and golf. Could be hang gliding, I guess, would be another one. So is what we're kind of discovering is that maybe these big experiences that are hard to, you know, coordinate in the real world are so easy to coordinate that the weight of the glasses,

you know, and some of these other limitations maybe go away because by comparison, putting for your dad to put the goggles on is one one thousandth of finding three other players in a tea time. Is that what's happening? That's certainly the bet that we're making on the golf run. I mean, just at a high level, our goal is not to replace, you know, real world golf. My co-founder and I are big golfers we've been playing since we were kids. So our goal is really to help introduce people to golf in a way that kind of gets them addicted and gets them to love the sport so that they are willing to go through the friction of playing a real round of golf, which is significantly higher than doing it in VR.

So I think that's really important. I think there are some other great examples that translate extremely well to VR and then some that are much more challenging. Like table tennis, 11 table tennis is another game. They've done an incredible job on the physics and matchmaking. So it's just trivial to put on your headset. you know, pick up your controller and play ping pong table tennis with another person that's at your same skill level without leaving your house. And a lot of people are, you know, losing significant

weight, just doing sort of the exercise side of it. I do think something like snowboarding is, is going to be something that gets solved, but it's more challenging because a big part of snowboarding is, is balancing, right? And sort of working the edges and, you know, catching air if you're really good. is your upper body. Yes, exactly. And baseball and baseball and table tennis is all upper body and very little lower body, right? And your feet are stationary or relatively stationary. Even something like tennis, you know, you have to run pretty far across the court to get

some of the shot. So emulating that in VR will be a bit of a challenge because of locomotion. But anything that doesn't require a lot of locomotion, I think can translate really well even today. What is your app cost? $20. $20. And then Beat Sabers like $50 or something?

It's like $30, but they have a lot of packs. Right. So they saw song packs and, you know, I think a lot of their players spend hundreds of dollars. What is the right pricing for this? Is one of the issues that casual gaming on an iPad is two or three bucks. We have free gaming with, you know, buying packs. And then when you open up your Oculus, I was kind of like, this is so fucking confusing. And where is the app store? I mean, it's it literally, you know, the first 20 minutes of using an Oculus is just torture. And then finally you get into a game, you get excitement. How bad is that onboarding experience for people at this point? And when does that get fixed? Because this really feels like a product that's been created in a Frankenstein mode, whereas I think Apple, if they made this product, you'd turn it on, you'd see a suite of apps, you'd click Beat Sabre, you'd click your golf game, and you'd be playing instantly.

But this thing makes you log in, create an account, find the app store. There's 20 choices. They're promoting bullshit everywhere. I mean, it is, on a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate the onboarding experience for Oculus? I know they're a partner, so I don't know how objective you can do. Yeah, no, yeah. We're, I mean, only because we're distributing our app through them. But I do think the very initial kind of experience where they just walk you through the basic

controls is pretty cool and like kind of a good way to get you in. But then in terms of actually interacting with the menus, so yeah, if one's the worst, I don't know, it's probably like a four and that might be being generous compared to Apple, which is like, you know, eight or nine. I think there's a lot of room for improvement. John Carmack, you know, the former CTO, he even says, like, if you start a stopwatch and you're a pro user and you put on your headset, from the moment you put it on to when you're playing a game,

it's still going to be like 30 seconds maybe. And that's like a ton of time. Imagine if it took 30 seconds to check your email on your phone. That would be ridiculous. I mean, it used to. Like, we used to dial up and, you know, and it was something that was obscure. So that's an easy fix. Right.

Let me ask you a question. about golf specifically. Do you find that people who play VR golf get better at real world golf? And is that part of your mission is, hey, start here and we'll make you better at it? Or is it, hey, we're just going to give you the golf experience here. We're not trying to make you better at real world golf. So we started with that goal in mind. We started with training as kind of our core business principle, not gaming. And what we realized pretty quickly is that we had no data to prove this. So, we figured the best way to get data is to make something fun so that we have a lot of usage and then we can kind of back into training. So we have not focused on training, but anecdotally, a lot of our players do say, this is really helping with my putting because now I have a better process for reading the break and seeing the line. We recently partnered with the PGA. And their core business is actually around helping people get into the game of golf. And they have, I think, 30,000 and instructors nationwide that teach people how to play golf. So as we move forward and as the market

starts to shift outside of primarily gaming, we would really like to solve the training side of it. And golf training is very expensive and it's very hands on, right? And I think with a combination of kind of AI and us able to track a lot of data about your swing in 3D, we're going to be able to solve this in a way that doesn't require as much attention from an individual person. I mean, the AI could be telling you what to change in your swing. And then also there were like some of these educational services that were doing sort of a global arbitrage. And, you know, an English teacher teaching a Chinese student, vice versa, a French teacher teaching, you know, French to an American who wanted to learn how to speak French. And then

they were charging 20 bucks an hour where a tutor might be 100. you might have people in the Philippines or Japan who would love to make $25 an hour giving people tips on how to play golf in VR and it might just be a side hustle and, you know, the $200 lesson goes away. Totally. Curious about actual real golf courses in the game. Do you have real courses in there? Because I do know some of my friends who golf will study the holes and, you know, do a little

pre-gaming of golf. That seems to me to be a huge opportunity. People could play Pebble Beach before going to Pebble Beach. And that was a hard tea time. And I don't know what it cost to play Pebble Beach. 500 bucks. 500 bucks. That's actually not so bad.

It's actually, yeah, it's one of the more reasonable ones. But even still, that's 500 per person. Right. So it's $2,000 for your four friends to go. If you could actually play it for a month before you went and you could be like, hey, whole six has come and we got to get over this water thing. That could be amazing. So, would you have to license those maps from those people? Do they own their maps? Is it public?

How would that work? And are you pursuing that? We are. Because that's marketing for them, too. 100%. So we were releasing our full course update on November 18th. That's, you know, coming out in two weeks. And we have our first real course in the game for that release, which is Wolf Creek, which is an hour north of Las Vegas and Mesquite Nevada, somewhat remote. and we talked to them, we licensed them. So that's the course right there, Wolf Creek. And we licensed, you basically licensed the brand, and then you're responsible for getting the data, forgetting the topology,

because the course itself doesn't have the most accurate topology for their own course because they don't really need it in a 3D format. So thankfully, because of our partnership with TopGolf, they have a lot of data that we can use, and then we take that data and then prepare it for VR. So yeah, you can see, this is my co-founder here that's, you know, playing the course. The greens are accurate. The contours are accurate.

Obviously, the graphics are the best we can do with the hardware that we have, but that'll improve over time. And you're 100% right about the Pebble Beach example. I mean, before you go on your dream golf vacation, why not play the course 10 times in VR over the period of a week and get to know every nook and cranny and be prepared to, you know, to play the course for real for the first time? So we think that that is something that players are going to get into. And even if you're not into playing the game itself, just to check out the course and see what some of these courses look like close up.

Because on TV, you don't really get a good sense of what the contours are actually like and what the 3D layout is like. Do you think Apple will come out with a VR headset or do you think they're just going to go straight to AR? Because everything Tim Cook says is like, you know, tipping towards AR. And if they had VR, kind of think they would have put it out by now. So what's your games have been shipped there? I think it's, you know, I think AR and VR are two sides of the same coin. And, you know, technically the Quest has AR in it, right? You have that pass-through mode where you can kind of lay out your guardian and see through. That's AR. And I think what we're going to-

Explain what that is for people who don't know the guardian concept and, you know. Okay. Yeah. So the Quest has cameras on it, right, so that it can see the real world. And that's how it knows your position. And that's how it does its tracking. On the outside, cameras on the outside looking at the world on your behalf. Yeah, camera. Yeah, exactly. Cameras on the outside looking at the world. They're black and white cameras. They're actually, I think, infrared cameras. And you can use that to see through the device. So you get a view of what is going on outside me. You can see your hands and everything. They're just opening up API so that developers can use that to build experiences. And when you first put it on, you use the controller

to basically outline your guardian, which says, this is my safe space. It's not going to include a chair or a couch or something that I might smash my hand into. And as my controller gets closer to the guardian, it's going to show up in VR so that I know that I don't want to go past this point. So I think Apple's going to come out with a device

that is primarily VR focused, but it has cameras like the Quest that are much higher resolution. so that you can see through and you could see your hands, you can see other people, but, you know, the other people aren't, they're not going to see your eyes most likely, is my guess. It'll be like the quest, but a better form factor where they see, you know, your face is still effectively covered by the device versus something like magic. See, that would be cool because then you could go to your backyard with your headsets on.

You could actually hold a real golf club. Right. Or instead of using the Oculus controllers, they could snap onto a real golf club. and you could be out there on your back deck swinging and see your actual friend, but instead of seeing the real world, it would then display Pebble Beach on your deck in Brooklyn in your backyard or something. That's what's coming, isn't it? 100%. That's where we see it going is letting you swing your actual club

and hitting an actual golf ball into a net and then transmitting that data into VR and running the physics simulation, which is 100% possible. simulators do. I was saying at a rented Airbnb that was like some rich guys. It had a golf simulator in it. And like part of renting the Airbnb was this hundred thousand. Those golf simulators cost a hundred grand or something. The really good ones do. They come down to five grand, but you know, you kind of get what you pay for. Got it. And in that one, it was like a box in this room next to a bowling house. This guy had a trick down in his house. And it was like you could just hit the ball and it had a big projection screen. It was interesting. I mean, not for me, but. So that's going to be available to everybody in VR slash AR. What do you call that VR with the cameras on the outside that is more like an AR experience? That's called a pass-through. So- Yeah, yeah.

Pass-through basically means you're still looking at a screen inside, right? You're still looking at a screen, but it's displaying what's outside of the device. It's displaying through the cameras versus something like Magic Leap where you're actually looking through lenses. So you're seeing, you know, it's the same as looking through sunglasses. Pass through is looking at a screen. And then the other option is just looking through glass lenses. They're pros and cons to each. My bet is that pass through is where we'll see the majority of devices coming out in terms of being AR and VR capable.

Are you a subscription-based app or do you just sell the app one time and then try to get people to buy packs? Right now it's just one time, 20 bucks. We are going to, the Wolf Creek thing is going to be our first pack, so our first golf course. And where we see this going eventually is, you know, I'm not sure how into, you know, NFTs and crypto and that type of thing. But we really see a lot of the things happening in VR turning into components of this sort of greater metaverse, right? Where the metaverse in my mind is like the web. It's not quite like the internet because the internet kind of powers everything, right? and the internet doesn't actually need a display,

but the web is how you interface with the internet in a lot of cases. And I think the Metaverse is going to work like that. It's interfacing with the internet or whatever through a virtual interface. And we think the big opportunity is effectively building out the golf side of that, right? If you look at the real world, nobody owns the sport of golf. It's a sport, and there are a lot of companies that make money off of the sport by contributing to it in different ways. golf clubs, golf courses, all that. So we kind of want to set it up to effectively give our players the ability to sell

their own packs, to create their own golf clubs, to create their own golf courses. And, you know, structure it in a way where we get some small fee for doing that. So you could actually make the game free and then it comes with one course and you get a ton of users and then you say to your users, listen, create holes and people can buy holes, they can buy packed, they can buy challenges, they can buy clubs, and we just get 10%. And if you buy this course, you get an NFT version of it. In other words, you get to put it in your wallet. And then you could take that, you could take your golf clubs and you could take your

course and go put it in your world on the other side of the Metaverse somewhere. Kind of a more compelling process. When you look at a company like Facebook and they built, they were, they basically took the open web and closed it. Now they're saying they're going to do this open. There doesn't seem to be an open standard for VR. So as a developer, you're making for the Oculus, you're already locked into Oculus. When Apple's comes out or if Microsoft and Google have a product that kind of, you have Halo Lens, HALOLOLANs.

HoloLens rather. I think Halo is a cooler time. HoloLens. If you want it to be on HoloLens or Apple's new glasses, you're going to have to rewrite the whole code base is going to be ported or how much can you port and how hard is that going to be? Yeah, thankfully it's very easy. Almost every single experience that, you know, you have in VR right now is either built with Unity or Unreal, which are two game engines, both very, very, very well done. And ours is Unity. So as soon as Apple comes out or any other headset comes out, you know,

there are relatively few APIs that we're using that are Oculus specific. And even on top of that, they have something called OpenXR, which is effectively creating this bridge layer that will end up connecting with all the major headsets. So it is actually being set up in a way that is way better than any other platform that I've seen, even from the onset. Right now, it's just basically 100% control by Oculus

because that's the only headset. Is there a number two headset? It would probably be the HTC V or the Valve Index, But the, are those people still investing in them? And PlayStation had one at some point, right? Yeah, actually, the PSVR might be the second by the numbers, but it hasn't really done much in the last few years. PlayStation, you know, Sony is apparently coming out with a PSVR2 next year.

That's the expectation. Apple's coming out with something. HDC just put out a new headset, but it's not really gaming focused. It's a little bit unclear what they're trying to do with that. And then Valve is, you know, TBD. I think a lot of folks in the space are. are hoping that they keep going with it. Yeah, it's hard to imagine Apple is not a major player here.

Where did Google wind up in all of this? Google dropped the ball. They, I mean, they sort of took off. They created this cardboard thing, which was like, hey, look, VR can be super cheap and, you know, super low quality. And then they basically were like, okay, we don't know what we're doing. So we're just going to hold back and wait to see who figures it out, which, you know, to be, interestingly, it seems like a lot of Google,

Google successes are kind of in that vein where they sort of do wait a little bit to see who figures it out. And then they go create a better, more mass market version. I think that's where Google's really good. Is there an open source hardware program? All of these companies we mentioned focused on doing open source hardware for their server farms, right? Because they wanted to drive costs to the lowest possible.

Well, Zuckerberg is talking about driving Oculus to the lowest cost possible, but it's pretty clear he wants to own the full stack. He wants to own the app store. he wants to own identity, and he wants to own the headset. Just like Bezos insisted on owning the Kindle and the store where you bought the books and the connectivity between the two, is there an open source movement to make an open source VR headset that is cheap and anybody could make it and the spec is out there. So, you know, if anchor or, you know, pick some commodity hardware provider wants to just make

their version, they could piece it together. I'm pretty confident there is. I don't know what it is, and I have very low hopes for it, because, you know, Facebook is pouring $10 billion into this year and more next year and more the year after that, most likely. And a lot of it is research and development. It's not, you know, they're figuring out how the lenses should even work or what software to write to optimize, you know, rendering performance. There's so much low-level stuff. that it's like we're just not at the point where I think somebody with that significant funds could do it.

I wonder what of that $10 billion is going towards the hardware and the operating system of the headset versus other. That's a good question. I assume a lot of it is hardware related because that just seems to be a very expensive problem to solve. But yeah, I don't know. It would be interesting if they publish those numbers.

Yeah, I mean, you got to think Apple, which spends tens of billions on research every year, is matching them. doing something equally spectacular. Kind of interesting, I don't know if you follow the sort of war going on between Facebook and iPhones and Apple on Apple saying, hey, we're just not going to let you track users. Right. And now you, but they know that the next big compute platform is going to be VR, AR,

and all likelihood. And now Zuckerberg's like, you know what? Do you want to screw up our advertising business? We're going to do hardware. And we're going to pour 10 billion into it. So I'll see you on the court for that. It's turning into quite a showdown, isn't it? It is.

And I, yeah, I'm anxious to see what Apple comes out with because I've had an iPhone since they first came out. My career before this was basically in mobile from like 2008, right when the store came out. So I've been a big fan of Apple from, you know, forever. And they make a lot of money on hardware, which is not the plan for Facebook. So, you know, Facebook's kind of taking on more of this Android mentality, which is, you know, interesting to see kind of the Android side of it come out before the iPhone side of it since it worked in reverse on mobile. But I think Apple's going to try to make money on the hardware. And,

you know, Apple's also not really known for pioneering open platforms either. Quite the opposite, right? They're super closed, but they do an incredible good job at it and they keep it all private and they make it happen. So nothing would be better for you than a, you know, a three or four way race to get users up to speed here, maybe consolidating down to two, maybe a five-horse race, which is what it is now, Apple, PlayStation, Microsoft, Facebook. Yeah, yes, yeah. Sony, HTC, Facebook,

Apple's getting into it. And that Microsoft will be a player for sure, right? Microsoft, yeah, I think so. Microsoft is, the Xbox side of Microsoft has basically said we're not messing with VR for a while, which is interesting. So, you know, they seem to be more focused on the enterprise side of it with HoloLens.

I think they need to be involved in this. And if you look at how well they did with Xbox and you see Zuckerberg's presentation for meta was essentially, he just cut and pasted the halo, the HoloLens presentation. It was like, here's our version of HoloLens. Here's your desktop. Here's a bunch of things floating around.

Move stuff around. And oh, you can still see your desk and your actual real pen and paper if you want to. You know, it would look like he has a vision for that. and he always has had a thing about trying to get Facebook slash meta into the enterprise. Like they did an enterprise version of Slack. So he still has that itch. I think he wants to scratch.

And he said they would make it a separate login. It wouldn't be your personal login anymore. So that's kind of, he did mention that, which was like a, he's kind of like shooting a cannonball over the deck of HoloLens. And he's saying to Apple, we're coming for you too.

It's going to be quite a showdown in both cases. Yeah, I think so. I think what's interesting about, you know, the quest right now is it's very clearly a gaming device. And every headset that's come out other than like, you know, some smaller ones have been gaming focused, whereas Apple is unlikely to produce a gaming focused device. So I'm really curious to see what they show us because they've always been more focused on kind of general consumers than enterprise or gaming. And if they can turn VR into something that general consumers get excited about, that's where I see the biggest opportunity. gaming is not the biggest opportunity for VR. It's just the one that makes sense right now.

In the same way that Atari was... What do you think it is? Experiences and education are going to be the big winners? No, I think it's everyday use. Like, what do you use your computer for today? You know, you check email. You think it's like turn it on and do email and a headset. 100%.

I mean, you could just stay in your bed, throw your headset on, and now you're teleported to this beautiful beach where you're checking your email, doing all that other stuff, and then, you know, go and taking a break, watching a movie on a huge screen. And yeah, I mean, you know, you're... So you're full ready player one and your belief for where this is going. Oh, yeah.

There's no doubt. I find that completely dystopian, like we're in the headset for more than an hour a day. What's the longest you've worn the headset for? Honestly, it probably is like two hours, like a couple rounds of golf and then, you know, and then I take it off. So I'm not in there all day. But once it gets comfortable enough, like what's the difference between staring at your screen? You can still see what's outside, right?

Like with these past through cameras or whatever. So I think it's a pretty natural progression. I mean, obviously spending time of the real world. that somebody could wear for six, seven, eight hours, you know, full work day. I mean, I think that's probably, yeah, I think that's probably what Apple is working on. And frankly, the Cambria thing that Facebook showed, I think within the next like three years, we'll have something that's light enough weight that's like basically equivalent to wearing, you know, you know, ski goggles, goggles or glasses.

Got it. So I don't think it's that far away. Sk goggles are not uncomfortable for six hours. you may have to take them off and adjust now and again. Right. Pressure it on your face. And then the ability to turn on, like, literally just put what would be the equivalent of, you know,

the Bose headset. I don't have you seen the Bose spectacle. The glasses. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, chunky sunglasses. Right. When does that hit realistically, objectively,

objectively, when will we be wearing those? If three years from now we have a six, eight hour headset, that's light enough and comfortable enough for six, seven, eight hours. When do the glasses show up? That can do the same thing. So Facebook released their Rayban glasses that can kind of do that. And they can take pictures and you can listen to music,

but you can't throw stuff up on the screen, right? Right. So I think that's probably closer to the five to ten years. Got it. If I had to guess. If I had to guess. But I was going to say seven to ten before we can do that. And that works by projecting into your eye or projecting onto the glass? That's TBD, right?

So that depends. Is it passed through or is it something like Magic Leap? I don't know if you ever tried Magic Leap, but they... I have it. What's it like? So you can see through it perfect, like sunglasses. And then they have, you know, a relatively small area in the middle where you can see 3D content. And it's, it's kind of semi-transparent. So it's not perfectly opaque, right? You can still kind of see your hand through it or whatever. I think that needs to change.

Otherwise, it just limits what you can do with it. But yeah, you know, that's a big open question is like what ends up being the final version. Like hit the streets and like when will that happen if it does? They said that magically two is, uh, was announced and is coming out relatively soon. I'm still not 100% sure who they're targeting. It seems like they switched over to more enterprise.

So, you know, they got another $500 million investment. So obviously there are people that believe in them. Um, but, uh, I think the community looks cool.

It looks really cool to me. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. I think their four factors. Great. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it feels like you're either an X-Men and you're like Cyclops or something, or you're like in the Matrix or Blade Runner or something. I think a lot of them are going to move in that direction. I think there's like a side benefit of having these glasses that cover a good portion of your face in that you can't do face tracking as easily. So the whole privacy side of things, plus like, you know, being in this kind of safety bubble, plus the fact that it's probably recording everything that you're seeing, you know, could have some interesting effects.

On society. It's like literally in the William Gibson books, there was a concept of God's Little Machine, which was a Zeppelin. Imagine a little zeppelin, like the size of like, I don't know, half a loaf for bread or something. And it would float above you with a camera and like create a 3D model of the world and it would record your entire life, every conversation, everything. So everybody was walking around with these little zeppelins above their heads,

like little blimps, recording everything. And then in your glasses, you could play back any moment of your life. Wow. So that's essentially what this is going to build is like, instead of me doing a podcast, you could just have me walking around with his like goggles on or Joe Rogan. You could just be live casting his entire life like the Truman show. Yep.

You play back. What's the craziest kind of application you had there? Because I'm thinking about like if there was a war. Like imagine if World War II occurred like and everybody was wearing these. You would have like the entire war would be documented first person perspective or I don't know. I don't know. If you were... If you're Alex Honnold and you're scaling El Capitan or whatever he did, free soloing,

we could be wearing the glasses while he's free soloing. I couldn't even watch that movie. I know, right? It's nerve-wracking. Like, thankfully, you know what happened before it came out. But I think that's exactly it. I think live sports and live events is where this thing goes from, oh, that's kind of cool. I tried it.

It wasn't for me to... There's no way that you're going to watch a football game or a golf game when you're not in this experience because your experience is so much more real and you're still able to share it with your friends because they're virtually standing right next to you even though they might be in New York versus you in San Francisco or whatever. That's where I think things get really interesting. You know, Travis Scott does a concert that is this XR concert where like everyone's got a front stage pass or you buy an NFT and that determines where your location is at the concert. And you know, these virtual experiences end up being like is like $10 million.

show with like crazy lights and custom graphics and all of this stuff. So I think that's the crazy thing. I think live sporting is what makes this go bananas. We should, they should definitely do an exhibition game, where you have like a two-on-two basketball game. They agree to not foul hard. And we could literally,

you could be Steph Curry and LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, or whatever, and they're wearing the glasses. You get to have their firsthand experience of like dunking the ball or shooting. That's crazy when you think about it. I mean, those are the experiences that are going to be just absolutely wild. 100%. Yeah. I'm not the tallest guy. So being as big as LeBron would be like pretty crazy experience for me. Yeah. I think the Alex Honnold one is the, will be like the most

amazing one to like free solo. Or actually those giant, those big wave surfers out in Spain. Yeah. Or doing those 50 foot waves. Can you imagine they wore one of these headsets and like you get to experience being towed into a 50-foot wave. I mean, I have a hard time watching them on those 50-foot waves. Anything can happen. You'd have a heart attack. And, you know, the beauty of that is it still puts a lot of the effort into the person

doing the real-life experience, right? Which I think is really critical. And for our business, that's what we care about. We're not trying to kill golf or place golf. We want more people to enjoy golf. We just want to make sure that your first experience at Pebble, when you paid, you know, $5,000 for this trip isn't bad because you didn't have a chance experience the course ahead of time.

So I think it's going to be amazing when something like brain surgery or any surgeries, like any 12-year-old kid can buy a surgery pack, turn off, or maybe it's open source and free education like MIT OpenCourseware or whatever. Yeah. Imagine like some kid in the emerging world, FCA third world, but we call the emerging world right now, like to not rank these things. But in the emerging world, you know, maybe they don't have surgery, enough surgeons. and some 12-year-old, 14-year-old is like learning how to do some emergency surgery in HR, in VR, AR, whatever, X-R, and they figure it out, and they do it a hundred times, and somebody needs to get their appendix taken out, and they actually are qualified to do it, right?

Like, that could be, you know, pretty extraordinary. A hundred percent. I mean, what are the odds that the best surgeon in the world is actually the best surgeon if everyone had an opportunity to kind of go through the same process? You know, exactly. So, and that should change, right? So I think this is a great equalizer, and it does give people anywhere the opportunity to strap this on and take on experiences that, you know, they otherwise, it would be prohibitive for them to do. So I hope that's the direction it goes in. Feels like it's going in that direction. Ryan, great having you on the pod. And great things happen when interesting conversations occur on Twitter and then we make them double click on them and expand them here on the podcast. You're in Austin. I got to ask you. I have very strong feelings, but best beef rib, best brisket. Let's just go with those two, since those are the two best things you can get in barbecue. Don't at me with your pork ribs or shoulder. I agree.

I love pork, but we're going brisket, beef rib. What do you got for your brisket? So, I mean, if I could only pick one place to go to for barbecue, it would be Franklin's. I know that's kind of the generic answers, but yeah, yeah, people built it up and it delivered. that. So other than that, you know, Terry Blacks is a close second and way more convenient. So best sort of bang for the time buck, whatever. Uh, yeah. I'm going Terry Black on the beef rip. I'm going to go to the barbecue on the brisk. Have you done Franklin's? I've done Franklin's, not for a while. Okay, okay. I mean, listen, Franklin's brisket is legit. I'm sure on par with

the barbecue. I like going to La Barbecue at like, I think they open at 103011. So here's my like super tip. If you're going to get brisket, you just skip breakfast. You do a hike or something in the morning. So that's what my guy, Brian Alvin, I would do when we go. We go for a two or three mile walk. And then we go show up a little barbecue. It's opening up.

There's no wine. There's like four people there. Man, you get the first cuts of that fatty side of the brisket. Get a beef rib. But you're right. Going to Terry Blacks, they seem to move that line pretty quick and they'll run out. And that beef rib, I mean, expensive. Like, you're going to spend 20, 30 bucks on a beef rib, but it's giant.

Well worth it. Exactly. And then just make sure you don't have any plans for the rest of the day. Yeah, basically, those are like the one meal days. You're going to go one meal. You can go one meal. You skip the breakfast. You get a big lunch.

You put a hike in there. You go around Lady Bird Lake. Lady Bird Lake, you got it. Yep. You guys are a little Lady Bird Lake. Some disc-all. Yeah. All right.

Listen, brother. I'll see you when I'm in Austin. Thanks for coming on the pod and thanks for replying to my tweet. We'll see you all next time on this week at startups. Bye-bye.